id like to thank the admins for their timing, i was halfway through sending troops in an op im engaged in at the moment, had they waited another 24 hours to notify us of this i would have wasted hours more sending out attacks.
id like to encourage whomever was responsible for making such a decision to take the time to discuss the decisin they seem to have already made with someone who works in PR or marketing as what they have built in Tribal wars is in effect an excellent brand which almost any marketer or business owner would be proud of, your customers are largely passionate consumers of your product; many staff work as volounteers; people encourage their friends to join the game; they discuss it on forums; they eagerly anticipate the opening of new worlds and in essence have formed an alternate community based around the feeling of belonging they have within the game; they spend their lunch breaks at school and work chatting with tribemates over skype...
your customers actually feel a sense of belonging to your brand. Your customers very behaviour is effected by their subscription to this game, in some cases quite drastically.
its brilliant... i wish the customers of my buusiness were 10th as passinate or felt as involved as they do here.
heres the downside... what you are doing now is felt with disbelief by those loyal customers who werent just buying your product, but whom were subscribing to what you offered and basing a significant portion of their time and energy into your game. it is not felt like verbal abuse from a stranger in the street, but more akin to a slap in the face from a loved one.
I like many others came to this game from teh facebook ap, knigthood, people left in droves when afte months or years of playing the nature of th game was suddently changed, and many came to play tribalwars instead... now i and many oters find ourselves on a world where the same thing is happening.
Keep in mind, when you look at TW's army camp worlds, the people who would leave would probably not be significant enough to trigger something large enough to make TW actually start getting concerned about this. However, if you look at it from a community point of view, this could most certainly ripple out to other worlds.
But in the theory of a mass exodus, such a thing won't happen server-wide. It may occur on W47 or W49, but not much, if at all, on other servers.
And realistically, the change is a significant one on two worlds, and maybe a deterrent to some others, but no influence otherwise. The impact is like a severe storm. It will rip through part of a community and leave the rest not to care (unless they are connected to each other).
Unless TW does something stupid like start removing Churches and steadily scaling TW back to what it was in the beginning, I hardly see a 'mass server-wide' exodus.
